Taking its cue from consumer apps and devices, HP today took the wraps off a new infrastructure management platform intended to revolutionize the way IT administrators manage the data center, whether on-premises or leveraging an OpenStack cloud.

Dubbed HP OneView, the infrastructure management platform for HP Converged Infrastructure uses a Facebook-like interface and automation to simplify the management of data center processes-deployment, updating, migrating and troubleshooting-reducing the time required to perform many activities from days and hours to mere minutes, says Jeff Carlat, director of Converged Systems Product Management at HP.

"The reason we're doing this is because the world is evolving," Carlat says. "The demand on businesses is way outstripping the capacity of IT to deliver services. The current generation of management tools are really suboptimal to giving organizations what they need. They require a lot of people and serial processes."

Consumerisation of IT Infrastructure Makes IT More Efficient

By leveraging a social media-like interface and automated intelligence, Carlat says the OneView platform will help IT adapt to this changing world, allowing IT organizations to deploy their resources more efficiently and reducing the risk of the introduction of human error in basic but time-consuming tasks.

For instance, using traditional tools to provision hypervisors across 16 servers would require two hours and 50 minutes of administrative time, Carlat says. With HP OneView, it would equire only 14 minutes, he says. Or take retiring a virtual local area network (vLAN), which he says would take more than 480 steps and more than two hours with a traditional tool. OneView, he says, would allow an IT administrator to complete the task with four steps and 30 seconds of administrative time.

The entire platform is built on RESTful APIs and designed with extensibility in mind, Carlat says.

"Every single screen, every task within the tool is programmable and can be automated," he adds, noting that HP will make available a programmable interface through an SDK that will allow IT teams to tailor the platform specifically for their needs.

He also notes that it plans to integrate with the management tools of close partners like VMware and Microsoft.

"We see this as a huge opportunity to foster an ecosystem around this," he adds.

Carlat notes that HP spent the last four years collaborating with more than 150 leading customers across 30 real-world data centers to delve into the drivers of cost, inefficiencies and delays associated with common infrastructure management tasks, processes and steps to develop OneView.

At the same time, HP studied modern consumer applications that are purpose-built for specific tasks and sought to apply the lessons it learned to the complexity and scale of the data center. The result, Carlat says, is an infrastructure management platform that can deploy and manage HP infrastructure faster, with a 42 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a 220 percent return on investment (ROI).